There is an enormous amount of advice available on the web about how to get published.
So why add more? I think that the answer is that everybody's experience is different.
Perhaps the greatest novel of 20th century Italy, the Leopard, was never accepted for publication within the author's lifetime, William Golding's famous work, the Lord of the Flies, reputedly went through 32 publishers before acceptance and Harry Potter was turned down by perhaps 6 publishers before being accepted, though as rumor has it, initially rejected, by Bloomsbury.
Sometimes when you contemplate the hurdles to surmount to obtain acceptance by a publisher, you wonder how a published book ever sees the light of day.
You might conclude that to get published you need to be a celebrity (preferably with a ghost writer) or a journalist, already in the game.
Also you wonder why so many rather awful books do get published where your really damn good book does not.
Publishing houses and their bookshop and website clients are basically businesses.
They want to 'pile 'em high and sell 'em fast' (though not necessarily cheap!).
So a book written by David Beckham is good proposition.
But, not all being David Beckham or Victoria, if you like, what do we do? Well, what I did was to read the relevant bit in the 'Writer's Handbook'.
This tells you to make a list of those publishers which advertise themselves as being interested in your genre.
The list in my case, for young adult literature, was surprisingly short, perhaps a dozen or so.
No doubt if your specialty topic is the cultivation of broccoli, the list will be still shorter.
But no matter.
Publishers usually seem to ask for one or two chapters and a synopsis of the story - apparently they want a spoiler! So I sent out to each what they asked for.
About half replied, of which all but one reply was what you might call the 'bug letter' from a cheap hotel, if you know what I mean (and you are lucky if you don't).
One reply was nice but said they really didn't have time to take on anyone just now though they liked it etc.
Probably they had at least read it.
So one out of about a dozen actually looked at the stuff that I sent.
This was all a bit odd for me since I am by profession an astrophysicist and keep being approached by publishers to publish books! Not so in the intentional fiction market, it seems.
So I got frustrated, and put it on the back burner.
I'd written the book to read to my children, episode by episode, and didn't intend to try to publish it until friends started badgering me - although they hadn't read it, but there you are! But I did get published and this is how to do it: get on a plane to Munich in Germany to attend a meeting of a European Southern Observatory committee and get given the International Herald Tribune, not thinking about your book at all.
Turn to page 2 and find an advertisement which says 'We are looking for new authors: any subject', send off your book and get a letter back a few weeks later saying 'We love it' or words to that effect.
That's what happened to me.
Seriously though, the trick seems to be to find a publisher who is actually looking for new authors and will actually look seriously at your book - which is probably damn good and a lot better than lots of the stuff you find in bookshops.
So maybe the best thing is ring up likely suspects, culled from the pages of the 'Writer's Handbook', and find out if they are looking for new authors or only want to publish a new edition of 'Alice in Wonderland'.
Another thing is to use every connection that you have.
Is your brother-in-law working in a bookshop? does your auntie in Seattle have a friend who works for a publisher? and so on.
Actually, I must admit this approach didn't work for me but it is just a matter of luck.
If you are the right author at the right time for a particular publisher, you will succeed.
You have to try everything and not be shy about doing so.
And you should not do what I did which was to give up, of course, after only 12 rejections.
But I made it through in the end.